Around Maryland

Austin Voth’s time with the Orioles has taught him a great deal about who he is as a pitcher. Last week, he headed to Bel Air to see if the organization could help to answer another question. “Am I being the best version of myself,” Voth wondered, “or is there another version of me that I can be?” On the third floor of MedStar Health’s Bel Air campus, he took the first steps toward finding out. Instead of performing his between-starts bullpen session at Camden Yards, Voth worked through each of his pitches off the mound at the Orioles’ new pitching lab. Opened this summer in partnership with MedStar Health, the lab will help the team optimize its pitchers’ deliveries, for both performance and injury prevention, through the use of motion capture video and other tools.

In a swift swoop, former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin picked up young Aden, who gazed at the various patches on the man’s collared blue jumpsuit. Noah, Aden’s older brother, watched the encounter as dad and mom snapped a picture. The family joined the elite astronaut, scientists, the European and Italian space agencies and a mob of media for an evening in Laurel to watch a NASA spacecraft collide with a 525-foot asteroid. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, known as DART, is one of the first missions that attempted to change the path of an asteroid by slamming into it at 14,000 miles per hour. Scientists will use results to develop future protections against asteroids that are potentially harmful to Earth.

Earlier this year, a youth at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center was assaulted by several other kids: kicked in the face and head multiple times, and hit with a trash can and hygiene container as he was lying defenseless on the floor. Meanwhile, staff at the facility were delayed in responding to the assault because they were initially provided with the wrong unit location. The targeted youth was transported to the hospital to treat extensive injuries to his face and eye, as well as missing teeth.

Maryland and Virginia are two of the best places to be a teacher while D.C. is one of the worst, according to a new report. WalletHub ranked Virginia as the third best state for teachers in the nation, with Maryland not far behind in ninth place. In contrast, the District ranked 49th out of 51 total entries. The report looked at two main categories to determine its rankings: “Opportunity & Competition” as well as “Academic & Work Environment.”

Red Cross crews from Maryland are en route to Florida to provide help as Hurricane Ian nears. The Red Cross said it's working night and day to set up the relief operation and ensure tens of thousands of people in the potential path of this storm have access to emergency shelter. Water, cots and food join pallets upon pallets of blankets as part of a shipment of emergency supplies that are crucial to the Red Cross response in Florida. "The Red Cross is staging people and supplies in preparation of potentially housing up to 30,000 people," said Misty Bruce, executive director of the Red Cross Central Maryland Chapter.

Responding to Maryland’s water woes, the Environmental Protection Agency will make $144 million in funds from President Biden’s infrastructure bill available to the state for improvements to drinking water systems and wastewater management. The funding includes $76 million being made available now to the Maryland Department of the Environment for distribution to cities and other local municipalities after an outbreak of E. coli contamination earlier this month in Baltimore’s drinking water and what state environmental regulators have called catastrophic failures at the city’s two wastewater treatment plants.